Merry Christmas!

A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

Published by ‎ Tordotcom on January 7, 2025

The long-running Laundry Files series imagines a secret British agency that is tasked with defending Great Britain against occult threats. Since summoning a supernatural being from another dimension is essentially a math problem, supernatural incursions became more prevalent with the proliferation of computers. Laundry snatch squads capture cultists who summon demons and place them in Camp Sunshine for investigation and deprogramming.

As a boy, Derek Reilly mastered the game of Dungeons and Dragons. He did research into the occult to create new game scenarios. The government, mistaking his notes for evidence that he was summoning demons, snatched him and rendered him to Camp Sunshine. Years passed before his captors realized he was just a harmless, stuttering, mildly autistic kid, but by that point, camp authorities worried that he had absorbed too much knowledge of the supernatural to permit his safe release.

Derek has been in Camp Sunshine for thirty years, passing the time by running a Dungeons and Dragons game by mail. When he learns about a nearby Dungeons and Dragons convention, he breaks out of the camp, hoping for a taste of freedom before he turns fifty. Unfortunately, true cultists are also attending the convention.

Iris Carpenter — high priestess of the Brotherhood of the Pharaoh — now works for the Laundry, although she wears an explosive collar that will allow the government to end her life if she uses her skills to help the dark side. Iris leads the search for Derek and then joins a squad from the Laundry to put down the mischief that is arising in the hotel where the convention is being held. Supernatural action ensues.

Fans of the series will recognize Iris. Derek is (I think) new to the series. The most frequently recurring protagonist, Bob Howard, doesn’t appear in the main story, but after this novel concludes, two short stories featuring Bob round out the book.

I always enjoy Charles Stross’ Laundry Files stories, perhaps because he grounds the supernatural in math that opens portals to other dimensions, transforming the series into something that is closer to science fiction than fantasy. Generous infusions of humor make clear that the supernatural isn’t meant to be taken seriously. While some of the supernatural entities are horrific, the books are too funny to fit within the horror genre. A Conventional Boy works as an intelligent, fast-moving action story. Derek is a sympathetic, likeable character who uses his wits to save the day. What more could a reader want?

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All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

Published by St. Martin's Press on January 7, 2025

Postapocalyptic fiction continues to be popular despite the formulaic nature of the genre. All the Water in the World imagines an environmental crisis caused by global warming. Unfortunately, that takes little imagination, given the prevailing American insistence that fossil fuel consumption is patriotic and that global warming isn’t a thing, or at least isn’t a thing that human behavior affects. Corporate America uses Fox News to tell the far right what they should believe and the far right dutifully joins every culture war — whether a nonexistent war against Christmas or the notion that alternatives to fossil fuels are bad for America — without giving any thought to the consequences of their victories.

The novel begins with a family and a few others living on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The adults were museum employees who remain dedicated to preserving knowledge, but violent storms are making it impossible for humans to survive in Manhattan. How deer have managed to overtake Central Park without drowning like humans is a bit of a mystery.

The central characters are sisters. Norah, the narrator, likes to be called Nonie. She’s thirteen. Her sister Beatrice likes to be called Bix. She’s sixteen. Their mother has a bad kidney and, since hospitals no longer function and pharmacies have all been raided, everyone knows she’s going to die. Their father and the other important character, a Black guy named Keller, manage to salvage a Native American canoe from the museum just before the building collapses. They will use the canoe to begin a journey.

Journeys — the quest to find a safe place where life can be remade — are standard plot drivers in post-apocalyptic fiction. The protagonists hatch a plan to take the boat up the Hudson and then walk along highways until they reach a farm where Nonie’s mother grew up. Along the way, they will encounter and overcome obstacles, including infections and a group of bad guys who want to rape Bix. After two of the travelers contract dangerous infections, the protagonists manage to find a doctor, but she’s in a community controlled by a selfish a-hole who believes that medical care and antibiotics should be reserved for community members. The a-hole doesn’t want new people to join the community unless they can work and contribute, which doesn’t describe people who need to heal.

Postapocalyptic fiction often divides survivors of the apocalypse into groups of good people and bad people, the bad people consisting of rapists, thugs, racists, and dictator wannabes, the good being those who resist subjugation. The good are open to helping others; the bad are not. Well, that’s how preapocalyptic society works, so it makes sense that an apocalypse would only enhance division, selfishness, and delusions of entitlement. Better examples of the genre make clear that the dividing line between good and bad can be fuzzy when people fight for survival, but Eiren Caffall doesn't trouble the reader with subtle thought.

There is nothing particularly interesting, or credible, about the journey that the protagonists undertake. One of the kids turns out to be handy with a gun, but how she managed to capture the gun from grown men is never made clear. A character or two will die during the trek because that’s what the formula demands, but the story creates little tension regarding the fate of the resilient sisters. Caffall does, however, offer a convincing atmosphere as she depicts the dangers inherent in global warming, including flooding and mosquito-borne illnesses.

Perhaps with a view to giving the narrator a personality, Nonie has an affinity for water. The parameters of this superpower are unclear, except that Nonie knows when storms are coming. She keeps a water logbook to record her impressions of the water. Her entries are silly and pointless.

Flashbacks to the preapocalyptic world slow the novel’s pace, as do the intermittent entries from Nonie’s logbook of water. The story otherwise proceeds swiftly to its predictable conclusion. Genre fans who just can’t get enough postapocalyptic fiction might want to add All the Water in the World to their reading lists, but nothing about the novel causes it to stand apart from other formulaic depictions of post-apocalyptic struggles for survival.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Another Man in the Street by Cararyl Phillips

Published by ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux on January 7, 2025

Another Man in the Street is a story of migration that proceeds on multiple fronts. The character who links the others emigrated to England from the West Indies. Years later, he makes good on a vow by bringing his wife and son to England, but they might have been happier in Saint Kitts. Another significant character made his way to England after being released from a displacement center in Germany when the Second World War ended.

The primary protagonist is Victor Johnson. When he is almost 27, Vincent defies his father by moving to England with the hope of finding a job at a newspaper — an ambition sparked by his newspaper delivery job in Saint Kitts. Vincent leaves his wife Lorna behind but vows to send for her, as well as his son Leon.

On the voyage to England, the ship’s captain sets in motion a recurring theme of British resentment of colonials of color. The captain is convinced that the “coloureds” should remain in the colonies. “We make things all nice and easy for you, don’t we? Cheap passage to England, no questions asked. Loose women and lots of jobs. But have you any idea how many of you coloured scroungers are already in England? It’s the sixties now and we’re still letting you in.” Racist attitudes about immigrants pop up on other occasions but are underplayed. Perhaps that was a wise decision, although it prevents the divide between white and Black or between immigrants and British nationals from becoming a defining theme.

Victor gets a job “lifting and moving barrels” at a pub in Notting Hill where the owner calls him “Lucky” while letting him stay with the rats in the pub’s basement. A fair amount of attention is devoted to a barmaid named Molly who cheats on her boyfriend with a bartender, but it isn’t clear why she’s in the story. Perhaps her most important role is complaining about her discomfort at working with a “coloured” staff member.

Narration shifts to the point of view of the white bartender who is shagging Molly. The bartender is stealing liquor from the pub but allows the owner to believe that Victor is the thief. The bartender patronizes Victor when, on a lark, he asks Victor to take him to his “coloured hostel” where they can smoke some weed. These are a few examples of white entitlement that set the story’s tone. Shortly after Victor leaves his job, the white bartender gets his comeuppance, perhaps because of Victor, but any drama that arises out of that incident quickly dissipates.

Victor next works as a rent collector for Peter Feldman, who believes his Black tenants will be less inclined to dodge a Black rent collector. Peter came to England as a child to escape the Nazi persecution that destroyed his family. Like Victor, he feels himself an outsider in a society that doesn’t accept him without reservation.

Peter’s secretary Ruth has an extensive backstory that includes giving up a daughter for adoption at her parents’ insistence. Ruth eventually moves in with Peter for the convenience of living near her job. She is vaguely aware that Peter is Jewish, but “she didn’t really know what this meant, other than some people didn’t like them.” She doesn’t know why Peter won’t talk about his history. More distressing to her is Peter’s lack of interest in sex, although he never shares the history that might help her understand his circumstances.

After Victor makes good on his promise to bring Lorna and her son Leon to England, he grows disenchanted with Lorna’s nagging. Victor takes a liking to Ruth, who shares a residence with Peter, but neglects to tell her that he is living with Lorna and Leon. To meet her need for sex, she begins sleeping with Victor, only to discover that he already has a family.

Lorna narrates a brief chapter. Her grievance amounts to: “Some people just have sex, but you wondered if you might also discover love, so that sex and love might arrive like twins, but this didn’t happen. He simply sexed you.” When Victor finally abandons Lorna for Ruth, he is unapologetic. “No doubt he thought he could go further in this world with a white woman on his arm,” Lorna thinks, but it isn’t clear that Victor thinks about much about race at all.

Along with Lorna and Leon, the daughter Ruth gave away for adoption returns to the story to cause friction. Ruth struggles with the guilt of giving away her daughter while Victor remains estranged from Leon. The larger point seems to be that the lives of immigrants, like the lives of most people, take unpredictable turns and inspire harsh judgments by others. Immigrants are no less likely than long-term residents to live soap opera lives. Readers who enjoy stories of broken or breaking families will find much to like in Another Man in the Street.

Victor begins to realize his ambition to be a journalist when he gets a gig writing for a paper that caters to immigrants from the West Indies, then takes a job writing for a serious paper as the voice of England’s coloured population. As a coloured journalist, Victor is only allowed to cover coloured stories. He at least has made progress toward his ultimate goal, but nothing is easy for Victor and the journalism gig is just another job that he won’t keep.

We follow Victor’s life to its conclusion, spending significant time with collateral characters along the way. The story has moments of insight into the varying experiences that migrants might experience, depending on the cause of their migration and their skin color. On the whole, however, the story lacks vigor. Any energy it builds dissipates as the focus shifts among characters.

To the extent that Cararyl Phillips attempts to find an overarching theme that draws the storylines together, the theme seems to dissipate before the novel cruises to its conclusion, leaving a collection of characters and their disparate stories that never quite cohere. Notwithstanding that criticism, the characters are fully drawn and provide interesting contrasts of migrant experiences in England during the decades that followed World War II. My sense is that the story could have been more carefully focused, but it always held my interest.

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Billy the Kid by Ryan C. Coleman

Published by Blackstone Publishing on October 15, 2024

Was Billy the Kid a people’s revolutionary hero or a murderer? Billy the Kid, a fictionalized account of his life, suggests that he was both.

The novel begins in 1877 when Henry “Kid” Antrium is seventeen. He has already learned a lesson that will govern his life: “No matter a man’s size, or lack thereof, there was one great equalizer: the gun.” Although Henry has mastered the art of shooting, he had been “making his living through thievery, relocating horses from the soldiers at nearby Fort Grant.”

Henry gets on the wrong side of Frank Cahill by breaking out of jail and having the arrogance to stay in Arizona. He saves himself from a lethal beating with his pistol, but Cahill’s death motivates a change of name and location.

In New Mexico, Henry has his first of many confrontations with Buck Morton. That encounter leads him to the Jesse Evans gang. Henry uses his credentials as a horse thief and killer to earn a position with the gang. He announces himself to the world as William H. “Billy” Bonney.

Much of the story takes place in Lincoln County, New Mexico. To the extent that the territory is governed at all, the government is corrupt. L.G. Murphy has made a nice living by selling and renting worthless land that he doesn’t actually own. Murphy enjoys the protection of the territorial governor, a presidential appointee who is under the thumb of Boss Catron, whose bank who holds mortgages on most of the property in New Mexico.

The Evans gang sells stolen horses to Murphy, who then sells them to a nearby Army post. Murphy knows the business is about to fall apart, but he keeps that fact from the partners who buy him out. His underhanded dealings lead to conflicts that become important to Billy’s story. Also important is Billy’s alliance with Alexander and Susan McSween, Murphy’s “sworn enemies.” The disparate power factions will inspire Billy to side with the underdog and kill anyone who seems unfit for a decent life, but what does that say about Billy’s decency?

Billy is clearly on the road to a shootout. The violence that ensues touches the good and bad about equally, although separating the good from the bad is challenging in a lawless territory, where the libertarian principles “might makes right” and “greed is good” control behavior.

We learn biographical details about Billy’s adoptive parents, his separation from his brother and their distant relationship, and a transgression that led to his first jail break and horse theft. These are presumably historically accurate and provide fodder for the way Ryan Coleman shapes Billy’s personality. Billy is motivated to gain wealth so he can give his brother a better life, but he evolves into a killer who has a fearless belief in immortality that inevitably dooms gunslingers.

Billy doesn’t appreciate the local press siding with the powerful forces that control New Mexico, but he’s hardly a paragon of nuanced thought. He occasionally frets about moral issues — particularly the exploitation of Indians, Mexicans, and working people by the wealthy and powerful — but gunslingers are shallow philosophers. Coleman probably gives Billy about as much personality as he actually had, which isn’t much. This isn’t the novel to read if you are looking for deep insights into the life of a gunfighter, although Billy’s life might not have been one that leads to deep insights.

Billy the Kid isn’t a literary achievement — it doesn’t rival Mary Doria Russell’s brilliant retelling of Doc Holliday’s legendary life — but it is nevertheless a fun tale.

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